Hana's Husband

Exode pulped: a whimsical depiction
of how Hollywood might present
the secret history of Earth...aliens
created the human species and then
used us as slave labor. Image source

When I started writing Exode, Hana was supposed to be the main character in the novel. The story was to begin on Earth and show Hana dealing with the behavioral problems of her daughter, Hilde. There was to be a mystery surrounding both Hilde's odd behavior and her father, whose location was unknown to readers at the start of the story: he had "abandoned" Hana half way through her pregnancy.

Prediction: Hollywood's obsession with alien monsters
in space is just as silly as imagined sea monsters.

If  I
were
to
give
in to
my
muse
and
affix
the
most
cliché
and melodramatic Space Opera spin to the plot of Exode, I'd say that poor Hana had secretly been used as a convenient incubator for a human-alien embryo. As a scientist in training, Hana could not help studying both her daughter and the mysterious puzzle of how a virgin (Hana) could get pregnant.

Hana finds the unique
gene pattern of Hilde.

Putting together the various available clues and puzzle pieces and making use of new DNA analysis tools like gene restriction enzyme site mapping, Hana eventually learned too much about her daughter.  As a consequence of her insatiable curiosity, Hana got to meet "Hank" Montpellier, an Interventionist agent.

Far left: Hilde.

Hank realized that Hana was soon going to reveal to the world the fact that the human species had been -and continued to be- crafted by aliens. Hank knew that he could "get rid of Hana" by telling her about other inhabited worlds in the galaxy and offering her the opportunity to go visit them.

Hana was a good mother, but when she was offered a chance to leave Earth and go exploring among the stars, she went. Hank had arranged for his assistant (an artificial life form that, for simplicity, I'll call a robot) to become the surrogate mother for Hilde.  Exode was intended to be the story of Hana's travels among the stars and her discovery of what motivated the Interventionists to work secretly on Earth.

Click image to enlarge. Kirk loses another redshirt. Classic
Space Opera: male protagonist, damsels in distress, alien
monsters, dead redshirts...all sadly lacking from Exode.

Although I seldom write stories about death and destruction, I spent some time trying to decide if I should include the death of Hana's husband in Exode.

The term "Hana's husband" is really a misnomer. Hana was never married, so if "Hana's husband" has any real meaning then it is something like: "the father of Hilde".

Suspicion of who might be the father of Hilde has, through the years, fallen on a few likely suspects.

Peter pulped. source

Firstly, there is the Editor. About the time that Hana became pregnant, the Editor was her boy friend. However, Hana and the Editor never engaged in sexual intercourse, so it always seemed very unlikely that the Editor was Hilde's father.

The second suspect was Peter. Peter did know Hana when they were in college and Peter, as a carrier of many alien genes, believed that he could not father children with Earth women. Confident that he could not become a father, Peter had unprotected sex with several women, including Hana's college roommate. Later, after discovering that Peter was inter-fertile with some Earthlings, some commentators noted that there was a theoretical possibility of Peter being Hilde's father, but there was never any evidence to support this idea.

Hilde's family tree.

Eventually, when advanced DNA sequencing technology became available, it was possible to demonstrate conclusively that neither the Editor or Peter was Hilde's father.

Surprisingly (for Hilde, Hana and the Editor), Hilde turned out to be one of the Atlantis clones, a group of alien-human hybrids who play an important role in the Exode Trilogy.

Peter had rather callously implanted an embryo inside Hana, but he never bothered to explain his actions to Hana.

Ivory's attempt to use the Bimanoid Interface.

When Ivory Fersoni was growing up, she was trained to fill out forms by indicating that her father had been a man named Adão. Since hearing that story of her origins from Ivory, I have subsequently received hints from Angela that contradict such a conventional explanation for Ivory's existence. Here are two alternative stories:

1) Marta, realizing that no human male on Earth could father her children, simply cloned herself. In other words, Marta might have been the original Atlantis clone.

2) The Atlantis clones originated as a woman who long ago lived in the Galactic Core. According to this hypothesis, when Marta wanted to have a child, she was simply implanted with an "Atlantis clone embryo".

Next: I had so much fun with the Hank Montpellier character (A.K.A. Parthney) that I decided to give him a larger role in Exode.